Looking Backward

Scott Shane
wrote in the New York Times on Saturday that the acknowledgment by
attorney general-designee Eric H. Holder Jr. that waterboarding is
torture amounts "to an admission that the United States may have
committed war crimes" and "opens the door to an unpredictable train of
legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a
full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals
suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in
just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to
avoid."